On machinic life and utopian fantasy - cartesian meditations on science/fiction topologies

Friday, October 18, 2013

What Swift Has to Teach Us About Digitized Mind and Text Machines (I)

Employing
mechanical devices for the purpose of learning seems to us like a
trivial fact. We use these devices as
educational means in our
everyday life practically all
the time. But
it was not always
so. There wasa
time when
many of the notable European intellectuals
regarded newly emerging world of machines
with the considerable dose of
suspicion. There were even intellectuals that adopted an openly
hostile attitude towards mechanical devices. Appearing
more visibly in the XVII century, this
attitude reached its peak during the industrial revolution.

The
reason behind this inimical stance was a
belief that the domain
of the mechanical is
something opposed
to the spiritual realm. Therefore, where the mechanical prevails, the
spiritualhas to absent
itself. And
yet,
the spiritual
had higher value for these intellectuals. Not
only because the machine was
of the flash, and the flash
had less worththan
the spirit.
In a turn characteristic of
the philosophy as such, the mechanical came to designate the very
essence of the flesh in the
modern era. This turn was
initiated by René Descartes, famous
french philosopher of the
XVII century.

Jonathan
Swift's speculative learning machine

Jonathan
Swift, author of the novel Gulliver's
Travels,stands
historically somewhere between the Descartes' mechanization of the
world picture and the socially ravaging machines of the industrial
revolution. In his novel, he describes a
fictional knowledge device, the
so
called
speculative learning machine.

The
word “speculative” stands for spiritual. Philosophically,
it
designates something divorced from the world of sensual (perception).
The
machine itself is depicted as a room-sized
wooden frame covered with bits of wood connected by wires. All of the
existing
words
of Laputa language are written on these wooden bits. The functioning
of the machine consists in generating random sequences of text in
accordance with the “proportions between
the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of
speech”. Here is how Swift
describes the functioning of the machine:

The
professor then desired me "to observe; for he was going to set
his engine at work." The pupils, at his command, took each of
them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the
edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole
disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded
six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they
appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words
together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the
four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three
or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that
the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved
upside down.

Interestingly
enough, the fictional device described by Swift strangely resembles
the first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC. Take
your time and read the whole
relevant passagefrom
the novel. It
is worth it. Than go on and join our philosophical effort
to analyze
this “wonderful machine” in the third part of this essay.

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About Me

Hello, I am a philosopher of Yugoslavian origin. In my
research I'm trying to untie the borromean knot of ontology, science and
politics. I am also an amateur hacker and a video game/science fiction
aficionado.

I currently live and work in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I write my PhD
thesis L'idée de machine et d'automate dans la philosophie de René
Descartes.